WHAT IS ART?

You’ll spend most of the day at the Venice Biennale asking this question and not getting a very satisfactory reply. Pity the poor punter – and there were remarkably few of these there - who’s confronted with reflections, for instance, on the dreadful Romanian exhibition celebrating “multiple hypostases”. Nicely laid out we conclude. But is that art…a nice, tidy layout?

Here’s the advice

Start in the Arsenale not the Giardini and spend 2/3 of your time here. It’s fresher, younger and more fun. Better art too. Spend most of the rest of your time in the Giardini, (where the big boys exhibit their heavyweight pretentious assemblies), on the Korean stand.  Give each member of your group a Strictly-Come-Art-Reviewing card and mark each thing you visit out of ten.

Some Arsenale highlights:

• You start with Charles’ Atlas; “The Tyranny of Consciousness” and Lady Bunny singing “What the fuck is wrong with me?” “It’s the Biennale mate” we replied. Good fun this song though.
• The Crossroads Community (aka “The Farm) from San Francisco – worthy and heart-warming.
• Teresa Lancasta’s colourful carpets
• Yee Sookyung’s amazing Dragon in Wonderland “translated vases”

And then some great national exhibits

• Argentina – a giant horse and small girl – benevolent nature fights back …great stuff (a 9)
• Chile – Chilling display of masks on poles (an 8)
• Georgia – war-torn, flooding house…eerily brilliant (an 8)

Some Giardini highlights

• The stand out brilliant stand was Korea. Worth spending an hour there at least. For anyone about to visit China it’s mandatory. We thought it got a straight 9 ½.
• Greece was interesting and provocative – “The Laboratory of Dilemmas” based on Aeschylus’ Ikidites. We gave it a 6 or 7.
• Australia – again a 6 or 7 for a brilliant little film about refugees that was a must-see.
• Russia got a 5. Some brilliant modelling and depiction of everything we fear and hate about communism. The lack of colour, the cloning and the violence

The rest

• There must be people (or something) that loves Phyllida Barlow – her cat perhaps but even her cat would have reservations. It was (literally) rubbish. 
• The USA vied with Phyllida for weird, abstract nonsense. Both got a 1.
• As did France. Empty recording studios. “Are there normally people there?” I asked. “they’ve gone to lunch” was the scornful reply. It was a meaningless effort.
• Romania -see above - got 3.
• Germany (the winner of best stand and the only queue we saw all day) has Dobermans in cages outside – now where did I last see imagery like that – and inside glass floors and walls behind which actors with expressionless faces do expressionless things. Too crowded to see much, too dull to care much. Give it a 4.
• Canada a nice cool fountain out of piles of old 2x4 off-cuts…a 5 for not annoying us.

The bar outside the entrance of the Giardini was excellent. Good loo too.  The loos inside near the Greek stand got a zero, a plain 0. GO TO THE LAVATORY BEFORE YOU ENTER THE GIARDINI.

Conclusion

Rage, despair and bemusement? Most of this is not art so much as “conceptual” constructions. For conceptual read “not having a real idea and then not doing it properly”. But there are exceptions. It would be worth coming to the Biennale if all you saw was the Korean stand. You’d also learn a lot about ten Asian countries.

So it’s a great day full of good, bad and ugly stuff. It may fill you with rage, despair, bemusement.

Boredom certainly not.

Ciao.

'ART, WHEREFORE ART THOU?'

I’d like to claim these words came from the second merchant called Biennale in Shakespeare’s lesser known “Merchant of Venice 2” but I can’t and it doesn’t.

But neither it would seem, does art play much of a leading role in La Biennale di Venezia – the 56th International Art Exhibition. The critics have been cruel about it. Respectively the Guardian, Telegraph and Times:

“More of a glum trudge than an exhilarating adventure”

“Hectoring and joyless”

“Why Venice should be allowed to drift slowly towards a dignified death”

Not ringing praise then and to be fair the Biennale’s title “All the World’s Futures” deadens one’s expectations with its sententious pomposity.  Why is it artists speak in a language (which I call Sewellese) that is excluding, abstract and just weird?

The Czech and Slovak Republic Pavilion slogan…inspiring thought!

Either that or they distress themselves by the foulness of capitalism (and they do this in Venice the very origin of a rapacious love of money), of inequality, cruelty, war and so on. Life seems bad to the artists of today. Ironically all this sits alongside some of the most joyously uplifting works of previous centuries in the galleries in the heart of Venice like the Academia, Ca Pesaro, Ca D’Oro and the Correr.

The Swiss Salon on the Zattere proclaims:  “The World’s in a Hell of a Mess” (is it? Well look harder), New Zealand examines “Psychological Blocks of Perception” and throughout the city there are fragments of letters of complaint by victims of torture in Iraq. Any second I expect to see Ed Miliband walk round the corners and say “see what I mean?” Phrases like “Present Nearness” from Grenada (no me neither) leap out of posters. It’s like being trapped in Pseuds Corner.

The actual Giardini event is vast. Things to like – yes in a messy world let’s look on the brighter side at last.

The giant live, helmeted, masked fighter pilot’s head with breathing kit at the entrance to the Russian stand is dramatic.

The intricate vast spiders’ webs of keys hanging from the ceiling and their videos of tiny children from around the world talking about where babies come from (“I came out very fast….. vroom…”)  in the Japanese stand was memorable.

The US stand of which I’d heard good things was just dull.

If you like Spam, cigarettes and female orifices you’d love the UK stand….some said it was “funny”.

But Fiona Hal’s work and ideas on the Australian stand was three star Michelin art. In six or seven sections it was witty, beautiful and thought provoking. She’d engaged some Aborigine women to work as a team creating soft toy endangered animals out of military battle fatigues and military waste….it was extraordinary. One wall was covered in a display of driftwood from a river in New Zealand – strange and beautiful.

The Australian girls on the stand were serious and very articulate.

Australia and Fiona thank you. I believe in art and the Biennale again.

THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN

I suppose why my heart sinks a bit at the prospect of the Biennale – the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice – is because it reminds me so much of old fashioned sales conferences – large budgets, the need to impress and a big venue.
In the Ca’ Pesaro there’s a work by John Baldessari, a canvas blank but for these words:
“Everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work”.
In the Biennale it’s just the reverse…all ideas but I’m not sure about the art.

 

Thus the Spanish stand has as its entry just a huge heap of rubble – yes - a metaphor for their economy.

The United States has sculptures made from rubbish, old bags of cement and assorted debris with officious girls saying - “don’t get near, stand behind the line”. Finland has trees and a tribute to photosynthesis. Korea’s included a dark room in which there was no light and no sound for sixty seconds. In there I had an overbearing desire to say “will you take your hand off my bottom?” to see what happened, but I resisted the urge.

The Dutch stand with human faces crushed in printers’ presses, the Japanese reliving crises like their tsunami in a series of sections entitled “precarious tasks” and the British stand were all  successes amongst others.

Jeremy Deller, the installation artist, had done Britain proud in recognising the stand had to be engaging and vivid. The exhibit of portraits by prisoners (mostly ex-soldiers) of significant people involved in the Iraq war was amazing.  Elsewhere he declares ‘war on wealth’, as the Guardian eagerly described it. The counterpoint of William Morris and the rouble-drenched Abramovitch was good and angry as was section all about the Prince Harry who allegedly once shot a harrier hen at Sandringham.

They were even serving mugs of tea on the stand.

The scale of the event overall is theme-park vast and tiring which meant when I belatedly reached the British Tino Seghal performance art piece which was the gold award winner of the whole show my mind was so battered that it seemed incomprehensibly weird. But Alva Noé from Cosmos and Culture said - and this made sense as I reflected on the sheer presence of the piece:
“this work doesn't play the "attention" game that is so basic to the performing arts. It doesn't try to capture your attention, or direct it, or organize it. The work is just there, like a picture on the wall, and the actors might as well be battery-operated machines.”

In my head I hear a chorus of voices muttering “philistine” in my not lavishing more praise on the Biennale but this is a show and about as far from the Guggenheim, Academia or Pesaro as you can get. Until as you limp away from the Giardini you reach the biggest art show in the history of mankind which is in the Arsenale. By now the chorus of voices in my head are whimpering “enough, enough!”

Bur first an old friend – no surely that isn’t the right word – a display entitled “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things” by Mark Leckey last seen by me at Bexhill on Sea at the De La Warre Pavilion. It seems out of place rather like seeing a London cab in the streets of Venice.
But then briefly two extraordinary moments for art anaesthetised eyes – the Peruvian exhibition of spices which touched the senses strongly and looked great and Pawel Althamer’s “Venetians” – a mass of skeletal sculptures of people with skinless bodies. Extraordinarily he’s produced these in association with his father’s plastics factory using extruded strips to form the surreal bodies. He says it’s to show “bodies are just vehicles for the soul”. It makes you stop, look and think. I thought it marvellous.

The Biennale is a huge success. It’s a hotch pot of “wow”, “yuk” and “what the hell is that?” Creativity, pretension and political raging co-exist but what it feels like is a big, important and inventive event.

If only the literature and marketing of the event were as good and clear as the best of the work is. At least Jeremy Deller shows the way how to do it in his brilliantly communicative work. Let’s see if they heed my words in 2015…it would make my life so much less tiring.

VENICE: A PARADIGM OF DEGRADATION?

Jan Morris entertainingly described the history of Venice as a transition from power to luxury from luxury to flippancy and from flippancy to impotence. But the Venice of today, where I recently spent a week, is on the ascendancy again.

There are real craft shops doing great stuff, the Biennale is in in full swing and once you’ve overcome three shocks one has a deep sense of admiration that billions of dollars have been well spent on restoration
.
The shocks are economic -the pound/euro parity – so a couple of beers cost £15; iconoclastic - the cruise ships (Voyager of the Seas which has over 3,000 guests and is 14 stories high slid past on the Giudecca Canal and nearly gave me a heart attack because there are no skyscrapers in Venice except these) and finally commercial, the posters and African market traders of knock-off designer labels in St. Mark’s Square. The 96 sheet ad for Citroen was particularly nasty, the Louis Vuitton knock-off bags a close second.

Pseuds’ Corner would have a field day with the arty fliers. Here are just some of them:
“One of a thousand ways to defeat entropy”;
“The cloud of unknowing”;
“Permanently becoming and the architecture of seeing” (this one authored by Julian Schnabel, the US film maker and artist) and from the Canadian exhibit at the Biennale itself – (Canada clearly got out of bed the wrong side that day)
“Triumphant secretion sculpted in foul mist
Dehydrated spectral birth at war with false metals”

Even the local Casino got in on the act with this: “an infinity of emotion” – yes that’s what you get with your chips on the tables of Venice.

The city is glorious – learning, effortlessly reaching back a thousand years and forward to a world of art and experiment, of hand craftsmanship and of car-free and Vespa-less perfume. Venice feels quite modern and self-confident in some ways, a world apart from the wrinkled old lady I first saw over twenty years ago.

Look at Venice today and see how once great can be reborn as the capital of conferences, global art, fashion and opera. There’s the odd jolt and tacky moment but it felt young, experimental and fun; a place in which to learn rather than a place in which to decay or die.

And maybe it’s a place to use as a new paradigm – one of restoration and hope.